Meaning & Origins

(French) form of Margaret, also used in the English-speaking world, where its use has been reinforced by the fact that the name was adopted in the 19th century for a garden flower, a large cultivated variety of daisy. Margaret was earlier used in English as a dialect word denoting the ox-eye daisy, and the French equivalent was borrowed into English just in time to catch the vogue for deriving girls' names from vocabulary words denoting flowers. See also Daisy.